Frank this may be a stretch but sometimes I think that the government doesn't want independant people to have the ability to create wealth directly off of the earth's resources. They want all the resources to belong to either the government so it can control and sell them, or to corporations which can be more easily taxed.

I am not a commercial collecter and I certainly don't support unmanaged commercial collecting. However if harvests were managed at sustainable levels commercial collecting would be perhaps one of the "greenest" sources of wealth there could ever be. One does not need to alter natural environments at all in order to harvest wildlife. It "costs" the environment much less to replace a wild caught herp(a living jewel) than it does to replace real jewels(gold rings, watches, etc.). A recreationally kept herp "costs" the environment far less to replace than so many other forms of recreation.

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